Radeon HD 3850 1GB vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 828 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB, which comes with core speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 480 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.